Let’s talk: communicating the luxury message online

When the government of Venice produced the first handwritten newspaper Notizie Scritte in 1556, it was in response to the need to convey news on the economic, political and military affairs of the state in a quick and efficient manner. Long before this period, the Chinese were already using handwritten messages on silk to transmit information on the affairs of the state to government officials on a daily basis although this took time to produce, transmit and read, and lacked the desired quickness and efficiency of information dissemination. By 1582 China had began to publish newssheets for private broadcasts in and around Beijing. Gradually, the idea of the newspaper as a source of daily news for the public’s digestion spread beyond China to other parts of Asia, even as it became widely adopted in Europe. The newspaper became popular when Johann Carolus published what has been recognized as the first modern era newspaper in 1605 in Strasbourg, then an independent imperial city in Germany and which is now in France. In no time, newspapers became adopted in Germany (1609), the Netherlands (1618), England (1620), France (1631) and Sweden (1645). The latter still publishes its first newspaper, Oprechte Haerlemse Courant, in an electronic format online. Stateside, the American population was not to get a taste of the newspaper until 1690 when Benjamin Harris published Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick and subsequently The Boston News-Letter in 1704 (Figure 5.1) which became the first continuously published newspaper in the US. Canada followed suit with the Halifax Gazette in 1751.